The first unit of Introduction to Gender Studies is dedicated to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that turned the tide into what many today call third wave feminism (to read about the waves of feminism, click here). This Bridge is an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa that was first published in 1981 by Persephone Press and then published again in 1983 by Kitchen Table (Women of Color Press). The third edition, published by Third Woman Press, was in print until 2008. For seven years, the book was virtually gone.

​Reissued nearly thirty-five years after its inception, this new fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by poet/ playwright/ cultural activist, Cherríe Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. Hailed as the landmark book offering a collective, serious challenge to white feminists by women of color, This Bridge reshaped how feminism was revised, reconceptualized, expanded, and laid the groundwork for the centrality of intersectionality today.

Fall 2015 was the first semester where I assigned This Bridge in my courses. I was curious because this book has never been assigned in my own college courses, from undergraduate (grade 13) up into graduate school (grade 20). In fact, no class that I have ever taken, even though I took plenty of Africana & Gender Studies courses, included the contributors to This Bridge: people like Cherrie Moraga, Nellie Wong, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, or the Combahee River Collective. As a young Black feminist, I taught myself about all of these activist-scholars on my own because they were never part of any syllabus. And though Gloria Anzaldua gets mentioned in the field where I have a Ph.D. (composition-rhetoric studies), she is often treated as just another “multicultural” voice and seldom as the radical, Chicana Lesbian feminist who changed the way we think about language, English, oppression, words, gender, and life. It seemed only right to me in that first time when I assigned This Bridge that I do something different from the usual assign-a-reading-and-then-quiz-the-hell-outta-your-students regime. As a black feminist, I try to remind myself constantly--- calling upon Anzaldua's spirit--- that classrooms must do something different with language and writing than what the institutional domains of (university) hegemony usually do. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color calls on all of us to do things differently!